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A close up of French actor Gerard Depardieu, who has threatened to quit his homeland to avoid higher taxes, showing off his new Russian passport on January 6, 2013. (Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife)

James B. Stewart writes “Common Sense” for the Business Day section of The New York Times. A Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and a professor of journalism at Columbia, Stewart’s The Myth of the Rich Who Flee From Taxes is either amateurish economics or deliberate distortion to pursue a political agenda.

Stewart writes to dispel, as a myth not worth thinking about, the notion that high marginal tax rates in one municipality, state, or a country push the wealthy to move to lower-tax locations. He assures his readers that although the notion “on its face seems to make sense…it is not the case. It turns out that a large majority of people move for far more compelling reasons, like jobs, the cost of housing, family ties or a warmer climate.” (Stewart: Stop the “Strawmanism.” No one claims tax rates are the primary determinant of where we live).

As proof of the myth, Stewart cites “three recent academic studies that have demonstrated that the number of people who move for tax reasons is negligible, even among the wealthy.” One, by a Stanford sociology professor, finds that “neither tax increases nor tax cuts on the rich have affected their migration rates.” Three co-authors from the pro-tax Center on Budget and Policy Priorities conclude that “Tax Flight Is a Myth.”

Stewart then cites Gregory Mankiw, chair of economics at Harvard, author of a popular Econ 101 text, and a frequent op ed writer for the Times, that tax flight is not a myth. Says Mankiw: “Rich people can pretty much live anywhere. If you’re a retired person trying to decide between Palm Beach and Santa Barbara, the tax difference between Florida and California is huge. If you’re an academic choosing between Stanford and Harvard, it might be a factor.” (Massachusetts has a flat income tax rate of 5.3 percent.) Even worse, one of the authors of Tax Flight Is a Myth appears to concur with Mankiw: “People who are very rich, who are retired or who aren’t tied to a particular location, do change their residency at a high rate based on tax differentials.”

To add insult to injury, Emmanuel Saez -- the J.B Clark award winner, whose studies of growing wealth concentration are cited with reverence by the Times – finds tax flight far from a myth. In his widely-cited study of millionaire soccer stars (Taxation and International Migration of Superstars: Evidence from the European Football Market), Saez and his co-authors find that “the overall location responses to the net-of-tax rate is positive and large, with an elasticity of the number of foreign players to the net-of-tax rate around one (and an elasticity of the number of domestic players around .15).” In other words, foreign players move readily in response to higher taxes, much more than local players. Tell Real Madrid that millionaire tax flight is a myth.

Stewart’s dismissal of taxes as a factor explaining where we live – along with family ties, language, and climate – displays his ignorance of scientific methodology. Any decent economist would use standard econometrics to hold these other factors constant to isolate the ceteris paribus effect of taxes. Using Stewart’s logic, we should declare Co2’s effect on global temperature a myth because it is only one of many factors affecting climate, clearly nothing compared to the sun.

My literature review suggests that most economic researchers find that, when other factors are held constant, higher taxes do indeed reduce the level of economic activity and hence migration (See What Is the Evidence on Taxes and Growth?). But in economics, as in other scientific disciplines (including climate science, I might add), there is never a “settled science.” There are always new data sets, new theories, and new methodologies that require revisiting earlier studies. Scholarly papers rarely dismiss any plausible hypothesis as a “myth” (especially on the basis of flimsy evidence). They know that the next study could come to quite different conclusions.

Stewart’s The Myth of the Rich Who Flee From Taxes would be laughed out of any economics seminar as the work of an amateur. But is he writing politics disguised as economics? Indeed, one of his respondents lays bare the naked political agenda behind the article: “You can always find an anecdote. Many people want this to be true as a way to discourage tax increases. The rich are always trying to find ways to make the middle class make their arguments for them.”

You see, Stewart had to slant this article to thwart the greedy rich who use tax flight as a bugaboo to hold down their own tax rates.

Now I understand: Stewart is not necessarily an incompetent economist, but a skillful political infighter, who deploys bad economics to discredit the anti-tax Tea Party, Rick Perry’s recruiting of California’s entrepreneurs, complaints about the fiscal suicide of high tax states, and millionaire industrialists and actors hightailing it out of France to thwart Hollande’s 75% tax.

Stewart uses the time-honored Times’ template to patch together his political case in the guise of objective economics: First, find “experts” who agree with you, build up their credentials, and cite them freely. Second, interview other experts who disagree but bury them deep in the text while obfuscating their disagreement. Third, label those who agree with you as non-partisan and those who disagree partisan. Fourth, select a headline that makes your case even if the headline distorts the content of the article.